Maria Bryant
Evaluation Group & Food and Healthy Weight Lead
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All our projects in this theme are designed to change policy or practice to provide opportunities for families to eat healthy affordable food and to be active in safe and attractive environments.
We work in partnership with community organisations and with local government in both Bradford and Tower Hamlets as well as with our academic partners, to co-produce our interventions and evaluation. A key part of this is to explore factors which influence eating and activity in our ActEarly populations, such as access to affordable food, unhealthy food advertising, school food and our green spaces.
This project is working with the UKPRP network GENIUS School Food Programme, to develop resources for primary schools to think about food across the whole school day to help children make healthy food choices.
We are exploring the range, characteristics and accessibility of food aid provision and assessing how the availability of food aid has changed through the COVID-19 pandemic. What we find will support local government decision making, including the relationship between the distribution of food assets and the ability of services to cater for dietary and cultural requirements.
Both our local authorities are taking part in the national Fresh Street study which is evaluating a new scheme that offers weekly vouchers for fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as vegetable based recipes and nutritional information, to households in Fresh Street areas.
ActEarly works in partnership on projects which take a systems-based approach to support health and well-being, including those with a focus on food systems. These include work to transform food systems across a whole region, and optimising food systems across all primary schools (CONNECTS). We are also working with Professor Amir Sharifat the University of Bradford, to map what the Bradford Food system looks like.
Want to find out more about Act Early and our work? Email us to ask questions, find out about volunteering or share your ideas.
The UK Prevention Research Partnership is a £50 million multi-funder initiative that supports novel research into the primary prevention of non-communicable diseases to improve population health and reduce health inequalities.